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    The Sorrow Proper
    The Sorrow Proper
    The Sorrow Proper
    Ebook138 pages1 hour

    The Sorrow Proper

    By Lindsey Drager

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    About this ebook

    The Sorrow Proper is a novel-length investigation of the anxiety that accompanies change. A group of aging librarians must decide whether to fight or flee from the end of print and the rise of electronic publications, while the parents of the young girl who died in front of the library struggle with their role in her loss. Anchored by the transposed stories of a photographer and his deaf mathematician lover each mourning the other's death, The Sorrow Proper attempts to illustrate how humans of all relationslovers, parents, colleaguescope with and challenge social "progress," a mechanism that requires we ignore, and ultimately forget, the residual in order to make room for the new, to tell a story that resists "The End."

    This debut novel explores the hypothetical end of the public library system and a young theory in the hard sciences called Many Worlds, a branch of quantum mechanics that strives to prove mathematically that our lives do not follow a singular, linear path.

    Lindsey Drager's prose has appeared most recently in Web Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, West Branch Wired, Black Warrior Review, Cream City Review, Quarterly West, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. A Michigan native, she is a PhD candidate at the University of Denver where she edits the Denver Quarterly.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDzanc Books
    Release dateMar 23, 2015
    ISBN9781941531242
    The Sorrow Proper
    Author

    Lindsey Drager

    Lindsey Drager is the author of The Sorrow Proper, winner of the 2016 Binghamton University / John Gardner Fiction Award, and The Lost Daughter Collective, which tied for first in the novella category of the 2017 Shirley Jackson Awards. Originally from Michigan, Drager is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the College of Charleston, where she teaches in the MFA program in fiction. Her work has been published in prominent venues including Web Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, West Branch Wired, Black Warrior Review, Cream City Review, Quarterly West, and Kenyon Review Online.

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      Book preview

      The Sorrow Proper - Lindsey Drager

      I

      THE ART OF CIRCULATION

      THE LIBRARY MAY CLOSE. The women who work there are told at the end of the day and as it begins to rain. The hair has fallen out of the bottoms of their weak buns and their pocketbooks are tight against their sides. When they are told, they do not hold their hands to their lips. They look down at the path of worn carpet or up at the ceiling’s spots of mold. One of them says, Shit.

      In the parking lot, the rain staining their cardigans dark, they decide to get a drink.

      What Genevieve can’t figure out, she tells the others, wiping beer foam from above her lip with her sleeve, is what will happen to all the books. All those shelves and shelves of books, she says, and no one looks at anyone else. All that time they had so carefully recorded. All that noise they’d been so diligent to hush.

      Mercedes puts her glass down too hard and everyone looks at her, waiting for retort. But she murmurs an apology and brushes the hair from her face.

      Avis wants to know why.

      It might be because of the Bronson girl last year, Genevieve tells her glass.

      No, Harriet says definitively, a company can’t be responsible for what happens on the street in front of it.

      Is a library a company? Mercedes asks, and they look at her with their best Be Quiet faces, and then they all look at their hands.

      For a long while they are silent, thinking about abstract things like control and what it means to love an institution that is defined by loss, because the library is such a space and their duty is to encourage the books to leave. They briefly debate ordering another round and then give in and discuss the way they feel the covers with their palms and finger the spines lightly before they stamp the cards and how their breath quickens a bit when a book exits the glass front doors because they know it might not be coming back, or that when it does it may be in poorer condition because so many value the book as a catalyst for thought and not as an artifact. Their eyes grow wide and start to gloss from tears when they voice the saddest cases, which they decide unanimously are those involving water damage. They toast to these and loudly clear their throats.

      When the women leave that night they look at each other without smiling, then at the way the water that lies on the road reflects the headlights of oncoming traffic, casting shine in their bifocal lenses. When each woman reaches her respective home, she locks her door and slips between the covers by herself. And as they lie in bed, they consider what it would look like, the library emptied, and think about the things that make them sad, all of which boil down to lack: a lost mitten nestled between chairs in the Children’s Wing, the unlit cigarettes that are dropped just before the large front door, the walls with abandoned hooks left by the local photographer after he dismantles his exhibits.

      They think about void, the emptiness of that era between lying down in bed and falling asleep, how it passes differently than the rest of time. They think there is only one other space in which time moves like that, without reflecting progress, a kind of eddying shift, and as they consider this, they each shake their heads and look up, the universal attempt to fight gravity when one feels grief moving in.

      They are thinking of the blank pages between the end of the story and when the cover comes.

      THE PHOTOGRAPHER FINDS HIMSELF taking down his photos just a week after putting them up. This is how long the library allows him to feature his exhibits since he is not yet established in his field. He uses a small ladder and removes each frame from the wall. There is a woman standing in front of the frame farthest from him, looking closely, brow furrowed and biting her nails. The photographer takes his time to shift the ladder six feet to the left, and then confirms it is sound before taking a cautious step. He holds both ends of each wide frame and lifts directly up, then forward, before slowly stepping back down. He does this thirty-one times with thirty-one frames until he reaches the woman, still standing in front of the last. He steps out for a cigarette, hoping this will give her time to leave, but when he returns, she is standing there still.

      Excuse me, he tells her back, and when she doesn’t move he touches her on the shoulder with his full hand.

      The woman turns around and when she faces him, smiles. The photographer starts to tell her he is taking the photos down, but she shakes her head and points to her ears, the wide grin still spanning her face. Her eyes return to the wall.

      The exhibit chronicled a collection of wine glasses, all with lipstick stains on the brims, most with chips and only one that is not empty. The glasses are thin and tall or broad and deep, with or without stems. They are standing up or stacked unevenly together or lying on their sides. They are all situated somewhere in a bathroom, lying on the drain of the sink or standing next to the soap on a shelf, stem up on the lip of the tub or hanging dangerously from the towel rack. Only the last photograph shows wine and there is no lipstick stain and it is standing on the toilet seat.

      The photographer wants to go home. He would like to be in his darkroom, spending the five minutes that are required for the eyes to adjust to confirm all the light is bound. He touches her on the shoulder again and when she turns around she looks almost surprised that he is still there. She digs into her purse and pulls something thin from the mess of her hair, hands him the pen and the pad of paper.

      The exhibit is over

      he writes, and hands it back. Over the speaker he can hear a soft voice telling the patrons that it is time to go, You have fifteen minutes to make your choices and make your way up front.

      She tears the sheet off and hands him her response:

      The glass: half empty or full?

      He looks up from the pad and she nods her head curtly toward the wall.

      He looks at his photo, stares hard at the glass balanced on the curved lid of the toilet seat. His eyes follow the grid of the print, scanning, and he notices something he hadn’t before; a bobby pin sitting in the crack of the tile in the bottom left corner of the shot.

      He looks at the ground and then shyly tilts his head in her direction, squints his eyes.

      There is a moment when he almost thinks to leave.

      He holds up the pad with two hands, taps his finger against the text.

      The exhibit is over

      She nods and flattens her lips, makes an audible hmm.

      I collect spoons

      she writes, and his eyebrows lift. She raises her index finger and draws the frame of a spoon in the air. Then she pulls it from where it is suspended, licks the cove, and places it on her nose.

      He grunts a laugh and shakes his head at the ground, fighting the smile that develops somewhere in his cheeks. The woman flips the pad to a page where

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